Black line tattoo of a heart formed from a treble clef and bass clef with three outlined stars, on the inner wrist.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Music heart and stars on a wrist

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black ink tattoo on the inner wrist shows a heart shape built from a treble clef and a bass clef, with three outlined stars beside it, one of them much smaller. The linework is simple and uniform, with the clef details drawn as solid strokes and the stars as open outlines. The photo is taken straight on against a magenta fabric background, with the tattoo centred in the frame.

Forearm Heart Star Treble clef Bass clef Music

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Old Harriet kept the coal barge Patience on the Ouse, and she kept a tin of sheet music under the tiller seat because her husband had been a singer before the water took his legs. Nobody on the towpath knew how to read it, so the children used the pages to wrap their sandwiches.

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One March the ice came down early and the lock at Naburn froze shut. A lad called Tobias, sent to fetch the lock-keeper, found the gate jammed and the cold creeping through his boots. He sat on the bollard and began to hum the bass line from a page he had saved from the tin, the low notes he felt in his teeth more than heard.

Harriet heard it from the barge. She came up the bank with a lantern and the treble part in her other hand, and the two of them sang the tune back and forth across the black water until the ice creaked and gave way, the way a held breath does. The keeper said afterwards he had seen three stars come out over the lock, though the sky was thick with cloud.

Tobias kept the page. Every year after, when the river went hard, he walked down to the lock with the folded clefs in his coat and sang the low part until the gates loosened, and the stars stayed up above him, one of them always smaller than the others, as if it were still learning the tune.